• Mark Hermeling, CTO at Asset Control


• 09.05.2019 11:00 am
data

Horizontal data lineage traces the journey of a piece of data as it moves through the system from source to destination. It could be a piece of content originally picked up from a prospectus or a company’s articles of incorporation; that is incorporated into a data product, is licensed by a financial institution; and put into a database before it flows through to a report or business application.

Vertical data lineage, in contrast, describes the transformations that happen to a piece of data on that journey. It could be an element feeding into a calculation: one of the sources of a bond curve calculation, for example.  And the lineage in this case would be to ‘go back’ from the bond curve and see what the individual bonds were that were part of the input. In short, horizontal data lineage traces the data back to the original source, while vertical data lineage effectively reverse engineers the transformations that happen along the way.

Financial services organisations need both types of data lineage to show the provenance of financial, regulatory and customer reporting. They are both equally important but they are also both difficult to attain.  This article looks at the challenges financial services businesses face in building robust horizontal and vertical data lineage and some of the processes  and technologies they can put in place to achieve it.